From McCain's Ohio speech:
In a radio interview revealed today, he said that one of the quote -- "tragedies" of the civil rights movement is that it didn't bring about a redistribution of wealth in our society. He said, and I quote, "One of the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court-focused I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change."
McCain's willful misreading reveals desperation (PS radio shows are not "revealed" -- people heard it at the time! It wasn't private. It's been dug up and placed in a new context -- Joe the Plumber's imaginary America -- but it hasn't been "revealed.") McCain has misread that passage from a radio call-in show so badly that if he were my student, I'd make him go back and read it again. What he says in that passage is that reformers of the 1960s thought they could pursue their agenda through the courts -- but the constitution sets LIMITS rather than asserting possibilities. The courts were the appropriate place to seek the restoration of fundamental rights (voting for all people) but NOT the appropriate place to seek a shift in the economic disparity between (principally) white and black citizens. It was NOT the role of the courts to reinterpret the Constitution, but the responsibility of community organizations to advance the causes of the (principally) urban black poor, specific to changes in schools.
Further reporting on the radio show shows that "Obama, then an Illinois state senator and part-time law lecturer at the University of Chicago, defined ``redistribution'' as ``how do we get more money into the schools and how do we actually create equal schools and equal educational opportunity.''
Such an effort . . . failed because the high court ruled it had ``no power to examine issues on redistribution and wealth inequality with respect to schools,'' Obama said. The justices decided ``that is not a race issue, that's a wealth issue and we can't get into this.''"
It's not a bomb-shell. It's nothing new -- except that it shows that Obama understands the Constitution and the judiciary process and the civil rights movement and . . . In short, that he's smart, and he's a pragmatist.
The absolute worst reading I've seen has been that by Glen Beck, who breaks the quote into almost unintelligible parts and then says whatever he wants to say in between. If he's ever had an English teacher s/he should be reprimanded for passing someone who is clearly an incompetent reader.
I'm finished suffering fools lightly.
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"You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil-rights movement, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it, I’d be okay, but the Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.
And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [It] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.
And that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil-rights movement was because the civil-rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that."
That is what Obama said. It looks like McCain read the 3rd paragraph verbatim.
He did, proceeded by a botched reading, intended to mischaracterize what Obama said.
Preceeded, not proceeded. Gack.
"and its litigation strategy": The point is that THIS is the subject of that first and third paragraphs.
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